Editor's Desk

For a music-lover, it's always a kick to re-encounter the figures who, in an earlier stage of one's life, were inspirational and influential in shaping one's passions. In January, I dropped in at Symphony Space, where Richard Wilson — head of the music department at my alma mater, Vassar, and my all-time favorite professor — was conducting the staged premiere of his only opera (so far), Aethelred the Unready. I had heard it in a concert version a few years back and was more than curious to see what a director could do with the very fanciful story line of the Anglo-Saxon king whose unfortunate sobriquet so irritates his wife throughout their afterlife together that she prods him to appeal to the Muse of History to have his reputation adjusted for posterity. The score is on the prickly side, with its jagged vocal lines defying any impulse toward lyricism, but felicitous strokes of humorous orchestration abound throughout, and the libretto (Mr. Wilson's own) is imbued with all the wit and whimsy I remember from his lectures. In a performance such as the one at Symphony Space, where the diction was almost miraculously comprehensible and the simple, straightforward and clever staging further clarified the plot, the antics of the helpless Aethelred as he visits a Publicist and a Hypnotist in preparation for his appearance before the intimidating and memory-challenged Muse kept the audience thoroughly engaged.

On a more recent weekend, an invitation from a fellow Vassar alum, who was the most dedicated and instinctively musical of the Madrigal Singers when we were in school together, drew me to the Aaron Copland School of Music, to see what the Queens College Opera Studio was up to this season. The young voices in a David Ronis's tidy, attractive staging of Dominick Argento's Postcard from Morocco were strikingly well prepared and, under the tutelage of music director James John, more than up to the considerable challenges of Argento's tricky rhythms and rangy, harmonically difficult vocal writing.

It's tempting for New Yorkers like me, who have the privilege of regularly attending live performances at the Metropolitan Opera, to allow their view of the city's opera-life to become entirely Met-centric. But these two recent forays into smaller-scale operatic ventures have whetted my appetite for more. Instead of paling by comparison with the productions of the big house on Broadway, I find each enhances my appreciation of the other.

LOUISE T. GUINTHER

Last Edited by awasserman at 3/7/2011 10:46 AM

Hi Louise, I'm glad you enjoyed the Aethelred! (I directed it). It was challenging to put together, as so difficult for the singers to learn, but it was fun to have all the Vassar voice faculty in one place for two weeks (normally, we only meet variously at the copy machine in the course of a year). I wondered who the Madrigal singer was you mentioned, because I also now conduct the Mads. Also, it's a smalltown riot to be reviewed in the same blog with David Ronis as "directors," since we knew each other as singers in our salad days in NYC: one of the first concerts I ever did in the city, I sang a duet (Jacopo da Bologna's "O cieco mondo") with Pomerium!Posted by: Application at 3/13/2011 8:43 AM